Our lived experience is acted out in space. One of the significant things about our existence in physical space is that we fragment space into meaningful “chunks.” In the process, an inevitable dialectic and a politics have emerged, whereby space has been intellectualized, space-types exist in oppositions, and certain space-types sometimes get privileged to the detriment or demise of others. The public museum serves as a model of public space. As traditional museums experience the challenges of storing and exhibiting physical objects (e.g., challenges of the systematic, mandatory, systemic, logistical, and strategic types), digitization is emerging as a player in the evolution of the public museum. The question of whether human interaction with digitized objects can be a substitute for our interaction with physical objects in physical space is taken up by this article. The article proposes that space-making is effective only to the extent that the process engages such a question in critical dialogue, all with the ultimate goal of taking into account continued cultural vitalization and tacit experiences of human existence.
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